Bank job losses 'could have been a lot worse'

Let's be honest, the announcement this afternoon that Alliance & Leicester is to axe 200 jobs in Leicestershire was no big surprise.

Spanish owner Santander said in December last year it was looking to cut 1,900 posts at A&L and its Abbey and Bradford & Bingley businesses. Union officials subsequently told us A&L would bear the brunt of these cutbacks, with 1,000 job losses.

Then in January, A&L announced the beginning of a voluntary redundancy programme for staff at its Carlton Park head office in Narborough and its Heritage House call centre in Southgates, Leicester (where the job cuts announced today are taking place). The bank said at the time the number of redundancies would be known by the end of March. Since then it has declined to give out any more details about job cuts - until today.

The bank has now announced more than half of the 1,000 job cuts the Communication Workers' Union had predicted after today admitting 250 jobs had been axed at Carlton Park and Heritage House since January, presumably many of them as a result of the voluntary programme. It announced 100 job cuts at its Wigan mortgage operation in August.

But even after the 200 job cuts - which are due to be completed by January next year - A&L, which had to be rescued by Santander after suffering a £1.3bn loss as a result of the global financial meltdown, will still be one of the county's biggest employers, with 2,250 people.

As one business leader said to me this afternoon: "Things could have been a lot worse."

Read tomorrow's Leicester Mercury for the full reaction.